BooksiRead the product that we started to build at Ugenie as a facebook application, and then took it to Hi5, Bebo, Myspace & Orkut is now also available outside of all social networks at http://BooksiRead.org

This enables us to do a few more things that were a little difficult so far.
Firstly, to those who love BooksiRead ( and said they used to log on to facebook only for BooksiRead) - you no longer have to depend on a social network. ( Yes, thankfully & luckily we have a few such users).

Now you can “take your reads” with you to your blog, to your website & showcase your shelf/reading profile.

With larger real estate available, we should be able to provide a richer experience.

A much richer profile page, that you can customize quite a bit.

Hope you like the product.

Do send me your thoughts, comments, brickbats … and more

p.s: You will be able to link all your accounts - across all networks, we'll roll this out this week, so if you have created your bookshelf, at any network, you don't have to duplicate the effort.

Books iRead - the facebook application, that we have been working on, is now a lot more.

The application is now available on most popular social networks - Orkut , Myspace, Hi5 & Bebo.

Most of these networks are yet to start promoting applications and exposing them to their users. Orkut recently made it available to all their India users & we are seeing quite a bit of traction from Orkut.

Besides distribution within social networks, which set it apart from other book community destination sites, iRead has grown a lot.
From a simplistic initial feature-set, which allowed users to search and add books, rate and review them and see their friends books, iRead has come a long way.

Some of the powerful features that we are proud:

-  Recommendations - Real-time recommendations, based on books you have added & rated.

-  Read Now - Allows users to read a lot of books online(~16k), and the set includes popular books like Alchemist, and Pride and prejudice

- Book clubs - a place for like minded people to get together, discuss books and anything else.

- Author's corner - a way for authors to connect with their readers and for the readers to get a closer look at their favourite authors.

This one is for the geeks - all the applications on the different networks work off the same code base. May not seem like a big deal to a lot of people, but as an engineer I am proud of this.

Been through a lot of tough times, and the ride has been a lot of fun. The learnings, from people to product, to business to technology …. have been tremendous.

Hope the ride continues… and iRead becomes the biggest & most used book community.